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Linux Journal builds a low power NAS with an Arm-based server and USB hard drives.

As an experiment, and finally to get rid of that large, inefficient and ugly tower case, I decided to use the new Trim-Slice as the base for an ultra-low-power, ultra-small replacement file server. The Trim-Slice is built on the NVIDIA Tegra 2 platform, and the specific model I purchased features a 1GHz dual-core ARM Cortex A9 processor, 1GB of RAM and a 32GB SATA SSD.

For the hardware, I ended up with a fanless MiniITX motherboard Intel D510MO, which has a Atom processor, Gigabit ethernet (all my home network is Gigabit, so it does make a difference). I am also using a 2GB 800Mhz Kingston RAM memory, and both two SATA connectors. The MOBO has up to seven 2.0 USB and one mini PCI Express, in case I want to add more SATA drives in the future.

SmallNetBuilder’s guide to building your own NAS device. In it they use a standard PC with an LSI Logic MegaRAID hardware-based RAID card. Included are step-by-step screenshots on setting up the RAID device using the MegaRAID’s bios, and benchmark of the machine while running Ubuntu Linux and FreeNAS.

SmallNetBuilder has benchmarks of file access to Ubuntu Linux and Clarkconnect over Samba. Included are instructions for setting up the software on both systems, and a guide to the hardware used in the project.